


The Bitterness in Distance and Black Coffee

by misanthrobot



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Amputation, Cannibalism, Gen, Implied Relationships, Mild Gore, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:57:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4030960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthrobot/pseuds/misanthrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something special hidden one of the back rooms at the :re café, and it's not imported coffee beans.</p><p>After smuggling Hide out of the sewers and into hospital care, Touka can't seem to leave him alone. Bad things tend to happen when he's left to his own devices anyway, so maybe it's a good thing she's looking after him. After all, if Kaneki isn't around to keep him from doing things he regrets, then the duty falls to her. Doesn't it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bitterness in Distance and Black Coffee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [headstomp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/headstomp/gifts).



> I typed most of this on a tablet, so if you found mistakes, tell me. I think I covered all my bases with the Mild Gore tag, but if you think something more is required, also tell me. The 'One-Sided' attraction tag is there because Hide's unconfessed feelings make his attraction one-sided in his point-of-view because he never knew whether or not Kaneki felt the same way.

"Waitress, can I get another cup of coffee, same as the last?" asks a customer sitting in the corner table. She's a ghoul, Touka can smell it on her, and she's hunted recently. It doesn't show on her clothes or on her face, but to Touka's keen nose, she still has the smell of human blood on her. She nods to the woman politely and pads back behind the counter. She's done this for so long that all the motions spill out like water, and even though the :re cafe is different from Anteiku, Touka made sure everything behind the counter was in more or less the same place it was when she and Yomo set up the café. 

She pulls the beans out from the shelf and pours a measured amount into the grinder, turning the crank briskly until she has a fine amount of ground coffee. After that, it's only a matter of putting it in the filter and setting it into the stand so she can do her pour-over. It might be the same as it was in Anteiku, but this isn't Anteiku. It isn't home, no matter how determined she is to make it feel like it.

Once she finishes, Touka takes the cup over to the customer, smiling softly as she puts it down.

"Is there anything else I can get you, ma'am?" The other woman tilts her head to the side and taps her chin in thought, letting long, brown hair to cascade over her shoulder. 

"I'm curious about something, miss waitress. There was a young man in here the other day... Somewhat tall, blonde hair for the most part. Do you know him?" The customer's smile is sharp and full of teeth, and she looks at Touka like she can see through any lies.

"Yomo-san and I don't like it when other ghouls treat this place like a display cabinet, you know... It attracts a lot of attention," Touka says, quietly and under her breath. Her voice is low enough for ghouls to hear, but the few human customers in the shop wouldn’t be able to. "If you can't keep yourself in check, we'd be glad to do it for you."

She can hear herself grow colder as she continues to speak, along with the feeling of her gaze hardening. It bores holes into the other ghoul until she picks up her coffee, takes a sip, and looks away. Touka takes it for what it is, a show of weakness and submission, and shifts back to a more neutral demeanor. She will not lose another home because some piece of trash thinks the café is a hunting ground. 

And she won't lose him for that reason either. Touka knows he is important, that he can help and that he cares.

"If there's anything else I can get you, let me know."

The ghoul customer leaves in an hour, and Touka works another five in nervous anticipation and dread that she keeps in a tight ball in the pit of her stomach. She resists the urge to go to the back room that Yomo's let her occasionally keep their guest in since she found him all that time ago, not that he's been subtle about disliking the risk she's taking in trusting that guy. Touka tells him it's not a risk every time it comes up, but it has yet to stick.

Yomo finds her busying herself with idle tasks, neatening up the cans of coffee beans and stirrers and cups. He takes the can away from her just as she's about to shift it two centimeters to the left and frowns.

"Go check on him. I can cover the front."

"Hah? Leave you here to greet customers? You'd scare them all away." Touka offers him a nasty grimace and reaches for the can again, but Yomo sets it where she intended to and she has to concede, reluctantly, that maybe he has a point. That doesn't mean she has to like it, but she finds it hard to like most things these days.

"I'll take our guest some coffee," she says, and if she seems a little put out by having to acknowledge his point, it’s only because she is. 

Touka leaves the front with a cappuccino in her hand and travels past the storage room and the employee restroom until she gets to the door of their homely breakroom. The person in there may as well be semi-permanent resident staying there, considering how often he comes by and how long he stays for despite not working at the café. Touka takes a breath to steady her nerves and force her anxiety back down. It wouldn’t do to have him catch onto her. He’s so annoyingly perceptive sometime.

She pushes open the door.

The room looks as identical to the one at Anteiku as she could make it. It has a small couch and a few chairs, as well as a coffee table. Loser is even still in the birdcage nearest to the sofa, having long since been moved from Touka's apartment. The curtain is pulled closed as always, but the room is well-lit by a standing lamp and a ceiling lamp. Nagachika Hideyoshi is sitting on the couch as average as he's always been. He's still dyeing his hair semi-regularly and wearing colors that edge on being offensively bright. He's already going brown at the roots, but if he's aware of it, it's clear by the smile he sends Touka's way that it's the last thing on his mind.

He’s also using his prosthetic arm to wave to her, holding it in the grip of his still present right hand. Today’s is the one with the split-hooks at the ends, rather than the one shaped like a particularly rigid flesh-and-blood hand.

"That's never as funny as you think it is," Touka says, huffing as she crosses her arms and leans against the doorframe, balancing the saucer and cup easily between her thumb and forefinger.

"It's always funny," he says before his grin morphs into a small moue. He slots his arm back over the stump he's covered with multiple cushions to make sure it fits in securely and stays in place. "Is that coffee for me? It's not black is it?" 

Hide pulls a face at just the concept of bitterness, and Touka rolls her eyes. "No," she says, passing him the saucer and cup. "It's a cappuccino."

He takes it from her hand gratefully after that and immediately takes a sip and, of course, burns his tongue. Touka has to hide a small grin behind her hand as he wrinkles his nose and pulls back to blow on the hot drink before taking another sip and sighing. Hide thinks Touka's coffee is always the best, and even though she insists that milk ruins the flavor, he can't bring himself to take it black. He's told her several times, it's just too bitter.

"It's been forever since you visited me back here, Touka-chan. Rabbits can die of loneliness you know."

"That's a myth," Touka says with absolute certainty. "And you're no rabbit."

Hide's heart constricts almost violently in his chest and he takes another sip of coffee to calm his nerves and keep his face from scrunching up too obviously with the intensity of his longing for the practically palpable missing third person that they both wish was here.

\----

Hide has barely finished hastily bandaging himself up by the time Touka finds him in the sewers, and even after all that he's still not sure he's gonna make it out of these tunnels alive. He's surprisingly okay with it. Ghouls need human meat to fuel themselves, and he wanted Kaneki to get out of here alive. Badly enough that he was willing to give pieces of himself to the other man. 

When Touka finds him, two of his limbs end in bloody stumps that are covered by pieces of cloth, the remnants of a pant leg and a shirt sleeve. His arm ends before the elbow now, and his leg ends below the knee, both places ragged and bloody under the makeshift bandages. Even like this, he's positive. Even like this, he looks at her with a smile that looks weak and shaky around the corners of his lips, but feels like it's just for her. 

"Hey, Touka-chan,” he says, recognizing her despite her mask, in spite of it. He's known who she is for a while, could never bring himself to fault her for the actions she'd taken, the one's he'd read about in the files. Everyone, he's always known, has their reasons. Even if he had faulted her, he could never bring himself to turn her in. Kaneki would have been crushed, would probably still be the sort of person to be distressed by her capture if he made it out of his encounter safe and sound. Hide sucks in a breath that sounds wet and shaky to his own ears. "I thought I was a goner."

Touka pushes hard off the ground on the balls of her feet and is at his side in one quick leap forward, lightly running her fingers across the places where his arm and leg used to continue and now just stop. His normally bronzed skin has gone bloodless and wan, but he's managed to stop his own bleeding well enough, though it's hardly enough to stop him from bleeding to death eventually. She's killed enough humans to know this much at least. To her, they are such fragile things.

The thought dying here when he confronted Kaneki, when he let his best friend eat and over-eat his flesh in his zealous and obvious insanity, didn't bother him at first. Confronted with Touka's presence, he's suddenly terrified by the prospect. He inhales again, barely, and squints at her through fading vision as she stands up and bites her knuckle. The way he smells as he's bleeding out is hard for her to resist. She hasn't eaten recently.

She pulls a face as she breaks skin. She tastes disgusting to herself but the foulness is enough to make the scent of Hide's blood stop sticking itself to the back of her throat. Touka inhales one more time, then reaches down and scoops Hide up bridal style. Even though he's limp in her arms, he doesn't weigh as much as he should.

"You'll be okay," Touka whispers. Hide is unconscious and cannot hear her.

She stands there for a while, and even though she knows every second here is one second less she has to get Hide to someone who can actually help him like she can't. She's used to the quick healing of ghouls. She's never had this need to keep a human alive. Touka breathes in rank tunnel air, tinged with the delectable tanginess of blood, and considers her options and the paths she knows. She can't afford to get lost down here when someone's life is in her hands.

She bolts off into a tunnel to the right, makes a second right and then a left. The dull grey of the brick walls meld into one uniform blur as she sprints through the underground labyrinth, looking for the proper exit up to the surface. If she's lucky, it will be close to one of the hospitals in the twentieth ward, and she can leave Nagachika in capable hands that are probably more than prepared to recive him, given what the Doves have done to Anteiku.

Once she finds the ladder leading to the surface, Touka sets Hide down and leans him against a wall. He makes a small noise of pain and she grits her teeth. Every movement he makes is so painfully human. It serves as a reminder that she needs to work fast.

Hide's head lolls onto his chest as Touka climbs up the ladder and slowly lifts the manhole up and to the side to take a look around. It's brought her up in an alley about two blocks away from the hospital, but her heart clenches hard in her chest when she sees what's at the mouth of the alley.

There are two CCG officers there, both with side arms that look like they would be loaded with anti-ghoul bullets. They seem to be talking and paying little attention to what goes on in the alleyway. She can overhear pieces of their conversation easily. 

"Hey," says one guard to the other, "do you ever wonder why we're here?"

"I don't know..." starts the other, and Touka tunes them out after that.

She pushes the manhole up and sets it carefully down on the ground near the opening, then hops down to retrieve Hide. She's so close to getting him to a safe place. She needs another little piece of Kaneki's happy days to be alive for him to come back to, wherever he ends up. 

As she climbs the ladder with Hide over her shoulder, she's starting to think that maybe she might want him to be okay for his own sake. Before, she would have killed him before letting him tell anyone else about her nature or Kaneki’s or Anteiku, but now she knows better. Knows that there are a few good humans out there that think they have the right to live, even if it’s something she doubts herself.

Nishino Kimi, though… Nishino had called her beautiful.

She pulls herself over the lip of the hole with Hide's body draped over her shoulder and settles him on the ground. Even from this far over, she can hear that the hospital is a crowded mess. There's no possible way she can make it near enough to get Hide there without being spotted. The CCG officers in front of her haven't noticed a thing, still engrossed in their conversation about God and the meaning of life. 

"What was all that stuff about God?"

"Nothing," says the other. "I don't wanna talk about it."

Touka gives him a conversational exit in the form of a small rock to the back of his neck from the roof of one of the buildings bordering the alley. One of them shouts in alarm and they both turn and, seeing Hide, immediately panic and train their guns on him. Touka's heart clenches tight in her chest, because if they assume he's a ghoul and shoot him, then she's the one who's killed him, not them and not Kaneki.

Once the investigators realize that he's unconscious and wearing CCG attire, they immediately start cursing and one leans down to the radio on his shoulder and calls for a medic immediately. Touka breathes a sigh of relief and watches as the medics come and put him on a gurney and push him in the direction of the hospital. Her heart thumps out a constant beat of 'he'll be fine he'll be fine he'll be fine'.

She'll not likely find Kaneki in this aftermath, and she's not sure she wants to just yet. Who knows what he's like, the man who tore pieces off of his oldest friend? What could she tell him that would fix the thing he’s done?

\----

The sun rises slowly from the east and it's light pierces through the blinds of a hospital room, eeking it's way through the entire space throughout the day. Hide doesn't wake up until the shine is directly on his eyes, and even then it's only after a month of moving in and out of unconsciousness, just barely avoiding being labeled as comatose. He's never been the type that's good at waking up and his mind feels like it’s trying to wade through sludge just to get back into the waking world.

Hide opens his eyes and lifts his arm to shield his eye from the sun, throwing his arm across his face and jostling the oxygen mask over his mouth. He makes a noise of irritation that sounds worn and tugs half-heartedly at the mask. The motion doesn’t feel quite right, like some parts of him are lighter than others, but his focus feels like it’s slipping away from him like water through open fingers. After so long seeing nothing but the back of his own eyelids, the sudden light feels like too much. His eyes hurt even when he finally pulls his arm away and squints up at the ceiling. It’s entirely unfamiliar to him, but one narrow-eyed glance around the room tells him he’s in a hospital. What else could this place be? Everything is blindingly white, and if it’s not white, it’s a washed out green or blue. A single deep inhale through his nose coats his sense of smell with the scent of antiseptic and fresh linens.

He doesn’t remember how he got here, and he doesn’t know where he is outside of the general idea of a hospital. He isn’t sure why he’s here. Thinking about it makes his head throb, and Hide shakes it and presses his hands to his face only to realize that he doesn’t have ‘hands’. Only one of his hands actually covers his face. His other arm lifts itself up, and his elbow bends, but that’s where the motions just… stop. Hide tries to lift his left forearm again, but it doesn’t work.

There isn’t anything there to lift.

“Wh--” he starts, but the rest of it comes out like a wheeze, air rasping harshly against his throat.

His entire body feels sore and strange and wrong as he shifts around on his hospital cot. The weight of his self feels off. He keeps trying to push himself up and miscalculating both the weight of his body and the fact that he doesn’t have a left hand to brace himself on. 

_It’s lost_ , he thinks, and claws frantically at the fluttering panic he can feel trying to escape out of his mind and into his actions. _I’ve lost my arm._

It’s determination that eventually gets him sitting up against the headboard of his hospital bed, but he’s too aware of his body now. Even if he wasn’t, it would be hard to miss the fact that the right side of his body also feels too light and when he looks down, Hide can see the sunken depression in the sheets where the lower part of his right leg should be. He wheezes again, flails on the bed and listens to the machines around him beep a little faster. It’s funny, he hadn’t noticed them before. How long has he been here, that his ears would get accustomed to this so much that the sounds would blend into the background?

The memories flood into his head into the forefront of his mind like the slow opening of a sink faucet. 

At first it's only steady dripping. Hide remembers wandering the tunnels looking for Kaneki and knowing where he would be going. There was only one route out of the tunnels and Hide knew it, and at the same time he knew Kaneki wouldn't be able to do it without help.

The drip turns into a trickle, and Hide remembers meeting Kaneki at his most desperate moment, and knowing that he needed to fight his hardest if he was going to get out. He looked so small, even with the terror of his mask looking Hide in the eyes. He sounded so lost when he told Hide to get away from him. He hears his own voice in his head, distant but present.

"Who cares about that, let's just go home already."

He knew then like he knows now that there was no way Kaneki was getting home in the state he was in. He would need something, and that something was Hide’s flesh. At that moment, Hide didn’t just need to be his friend, but his fuel.

The trickle turns into an open flow and the beeping of all the machines he’s hooked into grow faster and faster as the memories wash over him in waves. It’s pain. Pain, pain, pain all the way down. Kaneki’s teeth biting into him over and over again, pulling away and taking skin and muscle with him. The wet rending of flesh echoing around them as Hide bit into a wad of cloth Kaneki had torn from his uniform, tasting his own blood on it. 

Then Kaneki had started in on the bone.

Hide can’t remember anything after the sound of that first snap and crunch. He can’t do much after his recollection except choke on nothing and clutch his head, fingers digging hard into his scalp and pulling. A nurse runs into the room and tries to coax him back down on the bed, but Hide thrashes out of her grasp and tips himself onto his side. He doesn’t want to be here. He wants to be out. He wants to look for Kaneki. This sacrifice couldn’t have been for nothing. They promised him. They gave him their word. There was a contract.

The room is filled with indistinct shouting as he tries to escape it. He nearly gets off the bed just on sheer tenacity before a large orderly catches him and pushes him back down. The nurses voices are indistinct, commanding but so very far away. He can hear another voice, hoarse and faint and pleading, and he realizes it's his own. There's a pain in his wrist, and later he'll learn that he pulled out his IV needle, but for now it's so very distant.

"S-stop..." 

Hide feels a sharp pinch and then his vision dims and dims further, then goes dark.

He sleeps a little longer.

\----

Hide receives a visit from one of his superiors as soon as he's conscious and lucid enough to hold a conversation. The hospital has kept very careful eyes on him ever since he woke up, but he’s been the model patient ever since his first thrashing fit. He’d been doing his best not to draw attention to himself, to keep his thoughts on lockdown even when he wasn’t lucid.

Mado doesn't bring him a bouquet or balloons or even a get well card, but the minute the nurse leaves, she pulls a bar of chocolate from the inside of her coat and tosses it at him. He manages to catch it with one hand, putting it between his teeth so that he can tear off the wrapper and peel it back with his fingers. He snaps a piece off with his teeth immediately, chewing it up and sighing after he swallows. 

"Thank you, Mado-san. The lack of junk food here is killing me, I swear," he says around a second mouthful of chocolate. "Are you here to brief me about the results of the mission? I've been watching the news, so I know what's been released to the public, but it doesn't seem like a lot."

Mado Akira looks as she always does, professional, calm, and almost detached. He knows she isn’t entirely, no matter what Takizawa had told him in the lunchroom. She makes grim jokes and works hard and is on her way to becoming a First Class Investigator, if she isn’t already by the end of this operation. Her uniform is crisp and perfect, and she looks at him severely.

Akira’s eyes focus hard on Hideyoshi as one big picture and then breaks him down into smaller ones. Missing limbs. She should be used to them. Plenty of people at the CCG have lost limbs and considered themselves lucky that they didn’t lose their lives. While she’s not sure of a lot of things concerning Nagachika Hideyoshi, it strikes her as wrong that he’s missing parts of his arm and his leg.

“What were you doing?” she asks. Hide is sheepish and he feels himself warm up. He doesn’t like lying to Mado. He didn’t like lying to Amon, Takizawa or even Marude when he had to. It proved more helpful to tell them the truth in the long run, to an extent, but it had all been necessary to help Kaneki. He has no idea where Amon is now, so he couldn’t even tell Akira under duress. It strikes him as a dangerous thing to tell her, the full scope of what he’d wanted to accomplish with the CCG.

So he lies. Again

“I was… I wanted to know what ghouls could do. I got curious, so I went down into the tunnels to see if i could watch them up close, and I saw him there. You remember how I told you about him,” he pauses there and strains his foreshortened leg and arm. Mado looks on with wide, owlish eyes even after he sets them down. “You can see how that worked out for me.”

She doesn’t really believe him, Hide can tell from the way she relaxes her focus and crosses her arms, but it’s the story she has to take nonetheless. She’s good at her job, at dealing with ghouls, but her ability to read people is lacking. Either way, he hadn’t planned what to do after this, he didn’t plan after this scenario at all. Whatever she’s worried about him planning now, she must know that it will be hampered significantly by his recovery process. That aside, Marude has asked to discuss something with her after this visit, so perhaps she'll find out the full scope soon enough.

“What happened to Amon and Takizawa? What happened to everyone?”

Akira runs him through the details of it in a precise and matter-of-fact manner, as she always has. It’s devoid of her usual tone, the one she takes when she waiting for someone to add anything she can assimilate into her knowledge. Hide learns that Amon and Takizawa are missing, that Shinohara is in a coma, and that Suzuya is missing a leg. There have been countless casualties, and he feels intensely selfish for focusing on his own personal tragedy for so long, but his own feelings don’t surprise him anymore. Kaneki makes him a little crazy, sometimes. 

When he looks at her as she explains this, he feels like a traitor. He’d made friends in the CCG, ate lunch with them and talked with them, laughed with them and learned from them, all to get close to whatever he could grab that would lead him to his best friend. Now Kaneki is in the wind, he’s missing limbs, and the more he thinks about it, the more he doubts his ability to go back to the CCG after all that’s happened. It shouldn’t happen, and it probably can’t considering the agreement he made.

“Marude wants to know when you’ll be returning to your duties,” she says. He can feel her holding something back, but she says nothing more.

“I don’t know...”

“Well the CCG will cover the costs for your surgery, hospital care and prosthetics. I can’t promise they’ll be as high quality as the one planned for Juuzou, but they will be punctual in their arrival.”

“I meant that I’m not sure I’ll be coming back.” Akira looks at him, a good, hard look, and sighs to herself. 

“I understand what you mean,” she says, “and why you wouldn’t want to come back. That doesn’t make what I said any less true. I’ll make sure that we come through for you on this. No one at the bureau can doubt your contributions to what we are trying to do.” She holds up her hand, clenches it into a determined fist. It doesn’t keep Hide from thinking that she doubts his motives, or rather, she probably doesn’t trust what he’s planned to come to a good conclusion. Still, Hide looks at her, marvels at how she looks like she could sweep aside bureaucracy as a concept, and feels as guilty he does grateful. And he feels very, very grateful.

A few hours after Mado has said her farewells and left, Marude slips into his room and stares at him. Just… stares. Hide would feel more uncomfortable if staring him down wasn’t something Marude had made a daily habit of since he’d discovered Hide was friends with someone integral to the investigation. After admitting his best friend was a person of interesting the Binge Eater case, his reasons for being at the CCG became clear to everyone who’d heard, but only a select few knew what really happened to Kaneki. Marude was one of them.

Finally, he closes his eyes and shakes his head, snorting to himself after having taken in as much of Hide as he felt was necessary. 

“So?” Hide stares back at Marude, eyebrows slanted in confusion. Marude does nothing but pull of a chair in response and look at Hide expectantly, waiting for an answer to his question. Hide wants to be rude, almost. He wants to say ‘So what?’ and tell his superior to stop staring and that he’s well aware of what’s happened.

“Excuse me?” he says instead.

Marude gestures at his missing limbs, first to his left arm and then to his right leg. Hide twitches them minutely, bending them at the joints that he considers himself lucky to even still have. 

“Was it worth it?”

“Is he safe?”

Hide watches the older man shake his head and sigh, and he knows what Marude is thinking easily. It’s hard not to know what he’s thinking based on how he looks about three seconds away from giving Investigator Assistant Nagachika the most patronizing look. Then he does and Hide feels a little vindicated. He knows Marude thought that he was on a fool's errand and told him as much, but once Washuu Tsuneyoshi had heard his proposal and all of his theories, there was really no disagreeing with him. After that point, Marude had been more interested in what Hide had said to the director to get him to agree to his plan, and Hide never told him. It was, and is, none of his business. Hide knows that Marude uses people regardless of their status, which is fine with him. To save Kaneki, he had done similar things, hadn’t he?

“Depends on your definition of safe. He’s alive, if that’s what you‘re wondering. We’ve got him now and the experts in the Laboratory Division are running tests. Arima messed him up pretty bad. ”

Hide wants to be relieved by the news, but there isn’t anything to be relieved about once he thinks about it. He has the word of an organization that Kaneki has critically injured members of, and Maruda has just told him that Kaneki is hurt. He doesn’t even know how badly and he doubts anyone would tell him. For all he knows, he’s delivered his friend straight to his death, even though he’d given Kaneki a chance to fight and show what he could accomplish. Even though he’d carefully built his case to the Washuu Clan as to why Kaneki was valuable and should be kept alive.

He wishes that Kaneki had been strong enough to kill Arima and escape. Casting himself into the fire would have been an acceptable price to pay if Kaneki had been able to escape entirely.

“Well, that’s as much as I hoped for, at least.” Hide says, scratching the side of his face with the hand he still has. He resist the tightness he feels in his chest and the burning he feels at the corners of his eyes, shoving it all down and refusing to let that control him now. He’s done the best he could. He’s done all he could.

Marude has nothing to say to him after that. Hide’s surprised that he stayed as long as he did anyway, and once the older man has left, Hide feels a little less under pressure. He’s glad to be alone, which isn’t something he thinks often, but if he’s alone now that means no one can see him press his face into his hand and take deep, shuddering breaths. Try as he might to swallow past the lump in his throat and choke back his own tears, they fall into his palm regardless. 

In his hospital room, Hide cries like he hasn’t since he was a child.

\----

Touka first visits when visiting hours are over, dropping onto the roof from a nearby building. She misses by a short amount, manages to grab the ledge of the roof and pull herself up and out of the sight of the few nurses taking a smoke break. The hospital smells strongly of disinfectant and sickness even through it's walls. If she had stronger senses or if Hinami was with her--and that makes her mind trip over her loss for a moment, because she doesn't know where her little sister is--she would be able to pick out Hideyoshi’s scent from the rest of it. Instead, she'd stuck around the hospital during the day, listening the doctor's chatter until she managed to pick out information on him and his location. It is, to her knowledge, three floors down and two windows from the corner.

Touka waits behind the small entrance to the staircase until the nurses finish smoking and walk back into the hospital. Briefly, she considers following them, but there are too many risks wandering around inside a building full of people. Instead, Touka walks to the edge of the roof and looks out toward the hospital courtyard. It's thankfully empty, and with the moon absent from the sky, Touka feels comfortable working under the cover of darkness.

She looks over the edge of the roof and moves two windows over from the corner, then turns her back to the courtyard and bunny hops off the edge. Her fingers catch the ledge of the roof and she looks down between her body and the wall, calculating the distance of her next drop. Carefully, Touka let's go of the edge and drops down to the next window catching the ledge again. She does this twice more until she's clinging to what she desperately hopes is Hideyoshi's window, and shifts so that her hands are clinging to one side of the ledge.

As soon as she’s got a good grip, Touka twists herself and lifts her leg, wedging one half of her body into the window. She’s not scared of the heights or of falling from this window. More than that, she’s worried about being caught. It wouldn’t due to have to kill someone now to keep her secret. Guilt gnaws at her more frequently these days, and now she doesn’t even hunt anymore, only eats what Yomo brings back from their safe places. She could do it, she knows, but she would rather Hideyoshi not see her as that kind of person, that kind of ghoul.

The window’s curtains are closed and so Touka presses her ear to the glass and listens for any movement inside the building, eyes flickering to the courtyard to make sure that there’s no one walking around below her. She can hear breathing and the crinkling sound of someone flipping pages, but that isn’t enough to satisfy her paranoia. Touka presses her nose to the crack of the window and inhales in deep breaths, exhaling away from the window so she can keep refreshing the scent. It still smells like a hospital should, but under that is the very faint small of one Nagachika Hideyoshi. It’s warped by his stay here, changes in his diet and lifestyle, but it’s still very much there and it’s presence soothes her anxiety somewhat. Touka brings her knuckles to the window and hesitates once before knocking softly.

There’s a pause in the turning of pages and Touka knocks again before she hears actual movement. There’s a soft clattering sound and some cursing, the shifting of sheets and an uneven step pattern that she expected but desperately wants to ignore. Eventually, the curtain is pulled to the side and Hideyoshi stands there staring at her with shock in those wide brown eyes.

His hair looks a lot darker and a little more limp than usual, and he looks a bit paler from the lack of sun, but he’s still very much the man she remembers hitting on her in front of everyone in Anteiku, despite her being a high school student at the time. He looks surprised to see her for a moment before he’s immediately panicking. 

“Touka-chan, what are you doing here? It’s past visiting hours! You’re on a window! Get in here,” he says, whispering harshly. He tugs on her hand, but she’s like iron, and she stares at him until he stops and backs away, carefully maneuvering backwards and leaning heavily on a crutch.

She steps down from the window ledge and onto the hospital floor while Hide stares at her in open awe and concern.

“How did you get up here? I’m on the fifth floor.”

“I dropped down from the roof, but… But I didn’t come here for that. Do you… Have you heard anything from your Dove friends?” Touka asks, practically spitting the name out. 

Hide looks at her with mild reproach and sighs, turning his back to her and loping to the bed. He sits down and leans his crutch on the nightstand next to the table. He’s well aware of her dislike for the CCG, just like he’s well aware of the CCGs dislike for ghouls. Everyone seems to have their own reasons and they all boil down to who killed who and self-preservation. Hide can understand it, but he’s not sure if he can pick a side as seems to be required of him. He isn’t inclined to. He never got into this world in order to debate morality, all he wanted and all he still wants is his friend back.

“They haven’t really told me much,” he says, as evenly as he possibly can. “But I know that they have him.”

She looks angry as all hell, but she also looks like she’s going to cry. Hide isn’t sure if he wants to hold her close or turn over his hospital bed and hide behind it. It’d be difficult to do either if he’s honest with himself. Touka covers her mouth and whispers curses into her palm in a continuous string, pacing the length of the room and fuming silently only because of her location and the time.

“I’m sorry,” he says, but doesn’t continue. He doesn’t need to burden her with his own feelings, even though that feels dangerously close to something Kaneki would do, taking it all on himself. He also can’t explain all the wires and red tape he’d tangled himself and Kaneki up in just to keep the other man alive. It’s enough, he knows, to strangle them both. All he has is the hope that it won’t. He’s made some selfish choices in his life and this is no doubt one the most selfish, but Hide cannot, will not let Kaneki go.

“We have to get him back,” she says. “We need to break into the CCG and get him back.”

“They’d kill you, then me, then him, if we even got that far.”

“You’re not even going to try?”

“With what,” he hisses back, voice echoing in the silence of the hospital room. Touka looks at him, and he catches her eyes flicking to his arm and his leg and then back to his face. Hide hadn’t meant it like that, but there’s no hiding that his lack of limbs is an issue. Touka looks at him with pity and he hates it. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try, but we can’t do it now. Not like this. Not this soon.” Touka stares at him for a long moment and finally steps over to his bed. She drops herself next to him with a soft ‘fwmp’ and sighs.

“You… You don’t even hold it against him, do you?”

“Not really.”

“You humans,” Touka says, then shakes her head and corrects herself. “You. Nagachika. I don’t understand you at all.” She can’t help but think that maybe if she did, walking her tightrope would be a little easier. Almost as if he’s reading her mind, he laughs, and while it’s a little shaky and fragile, it’s the least fake one he’s offered anyone since he woke up from his coma.

“Do you want to?”

\----

"Hah? You brought flowers for me again? I'm only in here for another day, Touka-chan. This is just a little check-up."

"If you don't want these, I can always throw them away..." She trails off and scoots toward the trashcan, pinching the rim of the flower pot and dangling it above the trash.

"What!? No! I was gonna say I liked them!"

Touka laughs and it’s a soft sound that makes Hide feel like someone has settled a hot cup of coffee into his ribcage in place of his heart. She sets them on his desk instead of throwing them away (as if the prospect was a serious one in the first place, after all the trouble she went through getting them), then sits on his hospital bed near his waist. She reaches out for his hand and lets him make up the distance to lace their fingers together. Touka knows she’ll have to tell him eventually, because it’s only fair after he’s been searching so long, but she almost doesn’t want to when she looks at him lying in this hospital bed. The entire place smells like sterility and sick people, and his proximity to it disgusts her. She knows him now. It’s hard not to when he can be so open and when they’ve had two years to revolve around each other. Hide is what happens when sunlight and warm, open meadows condense themselves into a person. He belongs here as much as Kaneki belongs with the CCG.

“Something’s wrong,” Hide says plainly, and squints at her face. Touka stares back and tries to remain an indecipherable wall, but Hide is too good at figuring things out. If he’d put any real commitment behind remaining in the CCG, he would have made an excellent ghoul investigator. Touka is endlessly grateful that he didn’t.

“There’s only one thing… Did you… see Kaneki?” They stay for a while, staring at each other, and finally Touka can’t bear looking at him like this. She breaks eye contact and he knows. Almost immediately, he tries to pull himself out of the bed. Touka isn’t surprised because Hide has always been so damn determined to be near Kaneki for as long as she's known him, and it hasn't even been that long when she thinks about it. It breaks her heart that he can’t be this time and neither can she. Two years ago, he had been the one to coax patience into her with his words, and now he’s disregarding them completely and the irony isn’t lost on her.

Hide’s fingers slip out of hers and he’s already sitting up and trying to maneuver his way around her and to his prosthetic leg, cursing because he isn’t going as fast enough for himself. He’s had nearly two years to get used to his missing limbs, and a nearly as long to get used to his prosthetics, but his head is a little clouded over because Kaneki is alive and safe and he has to see him. Touka puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back down onto the bed. He grabs her wrist reflexively with his hand, but Touka only _looks_ dainty. In practice, she is as immovable as a mountain when she wants to be.

Hide sees the steel in her eyes and sighs, laying himself back slowly. Once he’s settled, Touka pulls her hand away and laces their fingers again. 

"Have faith in him," she says, and her smile is a little bit sad. "He'll come back to Anteiku."

Even still, she's got this simmering anger in her, paired with apprehension. The CCG has him now, in body and in mind. He has responsibilities with them, comrades with them, and a home. He can be more human as long as he's with them, and isn't that part of what he wanted in the first place? 

Even Hide is unsure if he wants Kaneki to return to Anteiku. It's a childish and selfish thought, but he mostly wants Kaneki to come back to him. There's been a strange ache in his chest since Kaneki cut him out of his life, and even though he hadn’t known why at the time, it slowly became obvious just how much Kaneki meant to him the longer he stayed away. He's not so stupid as to understate the feelings he has, and he just wishes he had the chance to tell Kaneki about them.

Kaneki isn't here right now, though. Touka is. Touka was the one who got him help before he bled out in the tunnels. Touka is the one who visits him in the hospital. Touka is the one here, right now, holding his hand in their mutual sadness.

"Hey. Touka, hey, look at me." Touka blinks as she feels Hide's hand brush across her temple, his fingers combing through her hair and curling it back into place behind her ear. 

"You’re right, okay? He'll come back. We can wait for him until then."

\---

Touka plops herself on the couch next to Hide, and offers him a sidelong glance as he shifts to look at her full on. Faster than he can see, her hand is on his cheek and gently caressing it until suddenly she's pinching his cheeks hard enough to turn skin bright red.

"How many times have I told you to be more discreet in the café," she asks, punctuating every word with a light tug while Hide makes pleading sounds and leans into her pulls. "Ghouls keep noticing you. You stand out too much."

"It's not my fault I'm so irresistible," Hide says, slurring out the words around the distortion of his face. It's something Touka agrees with and understands. If she didn't have her meals so regularly, his scent would be so much more appealing than it already is. Even so, there's that small part of her that rakes and claws to have a bite, even as it purrs sedately and sated with meat in her chest.

"Don't make jokes like that," she says. She means for it to come out snappish, but her voice fails her and comes out as a sighing breath at the end.

"Sorry," Hide says, apologizing immediately. "That isn't funny. I didn't mean to draw attention to myself here."

He'd hate it if Touka lost another home as a result of :re attracting scrutiny from the CCG.

"I was going to kill you, you know," Touka says, dry and with a tone almost bordering on casual. "When Kaneki first became a ghoul, I was worried that you might put him and Anteiku in danger if you found out."

She can hear him swallow hard and smell that slight spike of fear in the air, the tiny splice of sweat and adrenaline. She doesn't want to hold it against him. It's a normal reaction to being told a friend considered murdering him, especially after what happened in the tunnels, but part of her still feels a little bitter that he's scared regardless. However, he doesn't break her gaze and he looks her like he’s waiting for her to continue.

“I was going to kill you because you were too perceptive. You could figure out Anteiku and then everything there would be ruined. But you did, and you didn’t tell anyone. Even when you were with the CCG, you didn’t tell anyone.”

Hide looks down at the couch cushions, not looking her in the eye. His hand twitches on his knee and he clenches it into a fist and looks back at her with the most honest expression he can muster.

“How could I let anyone ruin the one place Kaneki was happy at? It was… It was the one place I was hoping he would come back to.”

\----

Touka’s taken to giving him a list of books he’s supposed to adhere to whenever he goes shopping for :re’s miniature library. 

“Otherwise you’d just buy manga,” she tells him every time. “That, or something trashy.”

He remembers the face she’d pulled with a sigh and a wistful smile. It made her look terrible and wonderful all at once, and when he’d told her so, she’d taken his hat and swatted him upside the head with it before shoving him towards the entrance of the bookstore and leaving to go get other supplies that the café needed.

Hide feels a sort of pressure pushing down on him when he enters the shop, but he’s gotten good at ignoring the weight of the past and the strain of nostalgia tugging at his brain. It’s close to Kamii, and it was one of the places he and Kaneki frequented, if only because Kaneki could never get enough novels. Hide scans the list of books he’s been sent to pick up and heads straight for the horror section once he sees that one of Takatsuki Sen’s novels is on it. He’s more familiar with that section of this bookstore, since Kaneki used to drag him along every time one of the morbid novels he was interested in came out. Well, that isn’t quite accurate, now that he thinks about it. Hide would follow him every time, like a cheerful stray.

There are a few people loitering in the section, fingers skimming lightly over books and occasionally pulling one out to read the backs of the paperbacks or opening them up to check the inside of book jackets. Hide weaves his way around them with smiles and apologies, making his way towards the section where Takatsuki's novels are kept. Normally, there would be plenty closer to the front, but it seems that all but the display pieces have been bought.

He doesn’t find any extras in the section where they should be, but a quick look around at the bottom shelves and Hide finds what he's looking for nestled in-between two books that have no business being on either side of one on Takatsuki's works. More than likely, it was put there by someone looking to hide it for a while until they had the time to come get it. Their loss, Hide thinks, and reaches for it anyway.

His fingers brush against someone else's, and he feels like he's been caught red-handed, but those hands are so familiar; black nails and pale skin and long, elegant fingers that he can easily picture holding books and gracefully flipping their pages.

It is, he knows, a cliché, but time seems to slow down while he follows the trail that’s set in front of him; his eyes seem to walk from fingers down to palm, from palm to wrist, up the arm to a shoulder, up the other man's neck to a face that looks so familiar that he can feel his heart clench in his chest. He catches the other man following that same path on his body, mirroring his actions unintentionally until they're both looking at each other with wide, wide eyes.

"Sorry," the stranger says. Except to Hide, he isn't a stranger at all, not really. He recognizes the curve of that jaw and the slope of his nose, the bow of his lips and the color of one of his eyes. Even the black hair bleeding into white is familiar. He drinks in Kaneki with his eyes while the other man shifts nervously, fingers twitching on the spine of the book. Hide wants to throw his arms around him, give him a tactless kiss on the mouth, and drag him out of this store. He wants to take the other man back to :re and Touka and never let him go again. Even more selfishly, Hide wants to take him back home, back to his apartment, and keep him for himself.

The look of confusion and fear, the struggle he can see behind those eyes, stops him. The man that looks like Kaneki-- and he must be because Hide needs this so, so badly--is muttering something under his breath that Hide can barely hear as his fingers drop away from the spine of the book. Hide has, in his own way, learned restraint from his past actions. He pulls the book out from the shelf and holds it out to the other man, waiting patiently until he's stopped muttering and relaxed himself enough to pull himself back into a more composed state of mind. The other man finally reaches out to take the book from him, and Hide relishes the way the tips of their fingers brush together across the cover.

"Thank you," he says at first, then, "I'm Sasaki Haise." 

He says it more like he's reassuring himself rather than telling Hide his name, and the entire time, he grips the book like it's a lifeline grounding him to this moment. Hide can feel his pulse speed up, following the beat of no, no, no, and this is wrong that is throbbing in his head. This can’t be happening, because the man standing in front of him is Kaneki Ken. He knows it with every fiber of his being. He’s looked into that face for well over a decade and almost bled to death in a godforsaken tunnel for it.

"Did I--," Sasaki starts, then shakes his head. "I mean... Do I know you? You seem so familiar."


End file.
